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{% block page_title %}The Future of the Open Web — White Paper{% endblock %}
{% block page_desc %}As we seek solutions, we can be guided by the core values of an open internet – a system for access, opportunity, and broad-based empowerment.{% endblock %}

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<article>
<header class="mzp-c-callout mzp-t-hero">
  <div class="mzp-l-content">
    <div class="c-callout-body">
      <h1 class="mzp-c-callout-title">Reimagine Open: Building Better Internet Experiences</h1>
      <div class="mzp-c-callout-desc">
        <p class="c-callout-byline">By Mitchell Baker, Alan Davidson, Alice Munyua, and Amba Kak</p>
        <p>The internet is at a crossroads. After decades of rapid growth and
          global contribution to the human condition, today many are questioning
          the health of the internet. At such a time it is natural to examine the
          first principles that many consider key features of the internet as a
          medium.</p>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</header>

<section id="intro" class="section-intro c-article-section">
  <div class="mzp-l-content mzp-t-content-md">
    <p>The internet’s success and impact is most often attributed to a set of
      design choices and embedded values from the internet’s earliest days,
      commonly grouped together under the label of “the open internet.”
      Historically, this set of technical and architectural features distinguished
      the early internet (and later the World Wide Web) from other communications
      media like the telephone, broadcast television, or print. Some of these
      features were codified directly in technical standards. Others have served
      as design values or norms in the development of internet-related technologies,
      including the web.</p>

    <p>Today the internet has moved far beyond narrow uses into fundamental
      infrastructure that is a central part of everyday life for at least half
      of the world’s population. In under thirty years, it has brought access to
      information, economic opportunity, and greater empowerment to billions of
      people.</p>

    <aside class="c-pullquote pullquote-intro">
      <blockquote>
        <p>Is openness still a valuable concept to draw from as we chart a future
          path for the internet?</p>
      </blockquote>
    </aside>

    <p>Yet today’s internet is not the internet we want. A rising tide of harmful
      content, surveillance capitalism, security risks and other problems have
      shaken our collective sense of optimism that the web is truly an inherent
      force for good. A ubiquitous network, personalized data targeting, and new
      monitoring technologies – divorced from proper oversight – have the potential
      to enable a state of total surveillance at the hands of private actors and
      governments. Marginalized communities have been targeted online and experienced
      violence and intentional harm. Today people can do much more online, but not
      without putting their privacy, security, and individual autonomy at risk.</p>

    <p>We often hear that openness or being “too open” is to blame for this
      situation. It is true that the builders of the early open internet assumed
      that the technical features of the network would “route around” problems of
      centralization and control, rendering legal or societal intervention
      ineffective. An early optimism that the system might evade many of the
      unwanted constraints of society has been replaced today with a realization
      that the internet is all too susceptible to societal and human frailties,
      with limited avenues for accountability or redress. “Open” has itself been
      co-opted by a wide variety of players to defend practices that once were
      viewed as antithetical to open values (including closed standards, walled
      gardens, or opposition to principles of network neutrality.)</p>

    <p>Is openness an outdated concept? Are the internet’s failures today an
      unavoidable outcome of the open principles it was based on? Or is openness
      still a valuable concept to draw from as we chart a future path for the
      internet?</p>

    <p>This paper traces the evolution of internet openness and the erosion of
      these values. And it examines how we might reclaim openness to address
      these real concerns about online harms while preserving the best features
      of the internet today.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section id="section-one" class="section-one c-article-section">
  <div class="mzp-l-content mzp-t-content-md">
    <h2 class="c-section-title"><span>Section I:</span> The Early Internet and the Power of Open</h2>

    <p>Historically, a set of “open” technical and architectural features distinguished
      the Internet from other communications media like the telephone, broadcast
      television, or print. Some of these features were codified directly in
      technical standards. Others served as design values or norms, manifested
      in areas like the open source and free software movements. They included:</p>

    <ul class="mzp-u-list-styled">
      <li>
        <strong>Decentralized structure:</strong> A widely interconnected network
        of networks, which enabled connection without the need for third parties
        approval and radically improved access.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Layered software model:</strong> A level-based model of abstraction,
        ensuring implementations at one layer do not impact other layers and enabling
        greater innovation and participation.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>“End to end” networks:</strong> Pushed intelligence towards the
        endpoints to minimize reliance on particular features of underlying networks,
        in turn enhancing innovation at the edge.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Open standards:</strong> Publicly available, non-proprietary
        standards allowed developers the opportunity to create products and
        services offering consumers more competition and choice.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Open source:</strong> Open source licensing offered greater access
        to tools, empowering people with fewer resources to problem-solve and
        create for themselves.
      </li>
    </ul>

    <p>These early design choices translated into a set of consumer and developer
      experiences and possibilities that reinforced (and were reinforced by) a
      set of social values, including:</p>

    <ul class="mzp-u-list-styled">
      <li>
        <strong>Access:</strong> the capability to reach the network, information,
        audiences, markets, and each other.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Opportunity:</strong> the chance to participate in the network as
        an individual with minimal restraint, without gatekeepers, and with the
        ability to resist centralized control.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Empowerment:</strong> a broad-based ability to create, shape, and
        participate in online experiences – in contrast with the pre-existing model
        of broadcast TV, where the only choice was what to consume.
      </li>
    </ul>

    <aside class="c-pullquote pullquote-section-one">
      <blockquote>
        <p>Openness never meant the absence of all restrictions. The open internet
          developed against the backdrop of technical features, social norms, and
          laws that influenced human behavior on the network.</p>
      </blockquote>
    </aside>

    <p>Openness never meant the absence of all restrictions. The open Internet
      developed against the backdrop of technical features, social norms, and
      laws that influenced human behavior on the network. Together these created
      a set of accountability mechanisms that provided a backstop and framework
      for a successful human experience of the Internet.</p>

    <p>Healthy communities, with meaningful participation on equal terms, were
      core to the successes of the early internet. In that era, however, the
      community was small – a small set of technically savvy people actively
      engaged in building and operating a new medium. That community had a shared
      purpose, personal relationships, and networks of trust. Accountability was
      achieved as much through personal and direct connection as it was through
      laws and regulations (although those had started to emerge as well).</p>

    <p>The early accountability mechanisms were also designed for a different
      scale of network. External attacks on the system could be thwarted by
      “routing around” the problem – e.g. if an IP address got blocked or a
      computer taken over, the network would adjust and was designed to be
      resilient to individual points of failure. Actors within the system were
      understood to be unlikely to harm the system because they were invested in
      the health and success of the network. Harm to one would be viewed as harm
      to all.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section id="section-two" class="section-two c-article-section">
  <div class="mzp-l-content mzp-t-content-md">
    <h2 class="c-section-title"><span>Section II</span> The Open Internet Comes of Age</h2>

    <p>As the open internet scaled from millions to billions of users, and new
      business models and network effects changed its landscape, the fault lines
      in openness and accountability mechanisms began to show. Two broad diagnoses
      offer explanations of the crises that today afflict the internet: an erosion
      of technical and architectural features that uphold open values, and the
      inability for accountability mechanisms (like law, policy and regulation)
      to adapt and scale to meet these challenges.</p>

    <p><strong>The erosion of open:</strong> Today many of the original open
      systems have been deeply encapsulated and controlled by layers of proprietary
      computing systems. There is more open source software than ever before,
      and open source continues adding positive value to the overall ecosystem.
      And yet the experiences of many internet users have migrated to closed
      systems, most prominently today’s popular social platforms. These platforms
      do not share the same design principles as the internet infrastructure on
      which they were built – and don’t reinforce the same social values. Many of
      these platforms still use the language and rhetoric of openness to describe
      their activities and ethos, but these are often shallow commitments. Key
      aspects include:</p>

    <ul class="mzp-u-list-styled">
      <li>
        <strong>“Open APIs” but walled gardens?</strong> Today developers live in
        a world of “open APIs.” Many of these open APIs are a crippled substitute
        for an open standard. There may well be cases where APIs are justified
        instead of an open standard. However, as a default, open APIs offer a
        limited subset of the elements that make open standards a part of a
        healthy ecosystem.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>From open source to proprietary software:</strong> A similar
        change has occurred with open source. Today open source is mainstream;
        Google, Amazon and Facebook all use vast amounts of open source software
        to power their business. But each surrounds the open source elements with
        successive layers of proprietary and secret systems. As a result, these
        companies harvest the benefit of open source, but provide a limited set
        of broader benefits to other actors.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>“Community” co-opted:</strong> Over time, “community” has evolved
        from the open source ethos of a self-governing community aiming to produce
        technology that is usable by all on equal terms. Today it is commonly used
        to mean nothing more than “consumers who use our products.” When a single
        corporate decision maker determines what is possible for users, and how
        those “communities” are tracked and surveilled and sold to advertisers –
        it is not the empowering and participatory nature of the communities that
        built the web.
      </li>
    </ul>

    <p><strong>Accountability falls short:</strong> The existing accountability
      mechanisms for the giant closed platforms that dominate the landscape today
      are not fit for purpose. This problem has manifested for a few reasons:</p>

    <ul class="mzp-u-list-styled">
      <li>
        <strong>Unanticipated harms:</strong> The seriousness and scale of privacy
        harms, security risks, and abuse online (to name a few) have been difficult
        to anticipate, even for those building them. This inability to predict
        and adequately forecast the range of threats to users means that both
        regulation and technical solutions has been resigned to catch-up. As a
        result, even efforts to rectify the situation have been tilted in favour
        of maintaining (rather than disrupting) the status quo.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Complex solutions:</strong> Even as the problem has become clearer,
        the question of possible solutions often prematurely ends because “it’s
        too complex”. This in part demonstrates the competing values involved in
        many internet policy debates today. But the resulting inertia has meant
        insufficient protections for internet users in the meanwhile.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Corrosive business models and incentives:</strong> Whether privacy
        or misinformation, the root cause of many of today’s challenges is the
        business model that powers many of these platforms. Increasingly referred
        to as “surveillance capitalism”, the financial incentives of businesses
        has been to service advertisers. There has been serious and long-standing
        push back to regulation and any other accountability mechanism from private
        industry.
      </li>
    </ul>

    <p>Beyond the private sector, accountability mechanisms must apply to government
      and intelligence agencies as well, who will inevitably be reluctant to move
      regulation against themselves.</p>

    <div class="case-study">
      <h3>Case Study</h3>

      <p><strong>Reimagine Open In Practice – Illegal Content:</strong> How can
        we address the real concerns felt today about illegal content online, while
        preserving the best features of the internet as a foundation for communication
        and inovation? That is a question gripping governments around the world,
        and particularly the European Commission as it considers a proposed Digital
        Services Act that will shape online regulation worldwide.</p>

      <p>The internet’s open architecture, coupled with the legal backdrop of the EU
        E-Commerce Directive and other innovation-friendly policies, has made it
        a natural engine promoting access to knowledge, greater civic discourse,
        and economic opportunity. Yet the internet’s very openness has been
        exploited by bad actors, and the persistence of illegal content online
        in particular remains an untenable threat to the internet’s original vision,
        jeopardizing both the legal and cultural environments that fostered broad
        engagement and growth. In that context,
        <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2020/09/08/mozilla-offers-a-vision-for-how-the-eu-dsa-build-a-better-internet/">Mozilla has proposed a set of policy changes</a> to create greater accountability for the largest platforms around concerns about illegal and harmful content:</p>

      <ul class="mzp-u-list-styled">
        <li>
          Greater transparency around advertising and algorithms that amplify content.
        </li>
        <li>
          Procedural accountability to incentivize strong moderation practices,
          using a risk-based approach that assigns greater accountability for those
          with the largest reach.
        </li>
        <li>
          Reorienting the business models that intensify harmful content
          dissemination, starting with privacy protections and new business
          models to attack surveillance capitalism.
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div>
  </div>
</section>

<section id="section-three" class="section-three c-article-section">
  <div class="mzp-l-content mzp-t-content-md">
    <h2 class="c-section-title"><span>Section III</span> The Future of Open: 2020 and Beyond</h2>

    <p>Today, society confronts powerful and accelerating technological change
      that is simultaneously beneficial and dangerous. As we seek solutions, we
      can be guided by the core values of an open internet — a system for access,
      opportunity, and broad-based empowerment. It is these values that made the
      open internet such an attractive medium to people and such a powerful engine
      of innovation. And these values are still relevant.</p>

    <p>But the original understanding of the open internet from its earliest days
      is not sufficient. Our new conceptions of openness need to reflect the lived
      experience of the internet to date, and with the diversity — and perversity —
      of humanity in mind. We should also reject the co-opted and limited model
      of “open” that has more recently taken root.</p>

    <p>Achieving this better vision of open will require work on multiple fronts:</p>

    <p><strong>Systems design:</strong> Technologists and the technology industry
      need to build alternative products and experiences that return to openness
      principles. This is easier said than done. Current business models are wildly
      profitable, and closed, integrated platforms have been able to build ever
      larger domains. However, consumers have been sendings signals into the
      marketplace that open products can be successful as well. And many
      technologists long to build products without the harmful consequences of
      closed systems. But good open product development will require investment:
      It took nearly a decade to build out the GNU linux free software/open source
      operating system, and some years after that for open source applications
      like Firefox to emerge, and even more time for open source to become a
      standard form of software development.</p>

    <p><strong>Consumers and users:</strong> Consumers must create a healthy
      marketplace by choosing and rewarding products that protect them and the
      broader values of openness. We need to create a culture where consumers
      look for products that solve their problems, protect their privacy, or
      protect them from hateful content - and a market that encourages a diversity
      of products that meet these needs to exist and succeed. Consumers should
      demand algorithmic transparency and accountability to support a better
      market. Just as we ask each other if we’ve seen good films, or read any
      good new books, we should ask each other what new products we’ve seen that
      improve online life. And just as “shop local” and other consumer movements
      have helped reinforce the positivity of local retail establishments against
      the dominance of centralized conglomerates, so would “download open” or
      “install healthy” help promote a better software ecosystem.</p>

    <p><strong>Regulation:</strong> The idea that regulation would necessarily
      be a roadblock to open values is giving way to the recognition that guardrails
      are essential for online innovation to develop in the interests of people.
      We need to seek out smart regulation that is consistent with and reinforces
      open values. New data protection laws, like the GDPR, stand out as useful
      examples. While privacy and openness are often portrayed in conflict, today’s
      data protection laws are largely demonstrating how privacy protections can
      further open values of access, empowerment and opportunity.</p>

    <p><strong>Governance mechanisms:</strong> We still need healthy governance
      systems, and as a start we need to reaffirm and strengthen multi-stakeholder
      processes. Some efforts have been underway to do so. For some, the
      multi-stakeholder process is seen as yet another way for large (mostly US)
      companies to insert themselves in the discussion and use their wealth and
      power to lobby for solutions that reinforce their position. Nevertheless,
      multi-stakeholder processes continue to be a powerful tool to address a
      range of issues.</p>

    <div class="case-study">
      <h3>Case Study</h3>

      <p><strong>Reimagine Open in Practice – Digital ID:</strong> Digital ID
        systems are increasingly impacting privacy, security, competition, and
        social inclusion. Identity is almost always mediating our interactions
        online, from corporate giants like Apple ID and Facebook login to
        government IDs which are increasingly required to vote, access welfare
        benefits, pay taxes, or receive medical care.</p>

      <p>The choices governments make in designing and operating digital ID
        systems will determine if an ID system will be empowering or exploitative
        and exclusionary. <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/files/2020/01/Mozilla-Digital-ID-White-Paper.pdf">Mozilla’s recent digital ID white paper</a>
        shows how openness provides a useful framework to guide and critique
        these choices. We demonstrate how five elements of openness – multiplicity
        of choices, decentralization, accountability, inclusion, and participation –
        can ensure that identity systems put people first.</p>
    </div>
  </div>
</section>

<section id="section-four" class="section-four c-article-section">
  <div class="mzp-l-content mzp-t-content-md">
    <h2 class="c-section-title"><span>Section IV</span> Conclusion</h2>

    <p>Open internet designers, activists, pioneers and advocates have undoubtedly
      made mistakes in pursuit of a connected world. As a community, we may have
      been slow to respond to the accountability problems in today’s internet due
      to our love of the values originally enshrined in “open” and “the open
      internet.” We should examine this history closely.</p>

    <p>But the broader Internet community need not break faith with the power of
      openness principles to create the connected Internet we want. We must
      squarely face the problems of online life today, and contribute to developing
      solutions. We cannot cling to the original practices for fear that something
      worse will develop. As we do this we must equally hold tightly the key
      concepts that were originally captured in “open” and ”the open internet”
      and made it such a powerful and successful force.</p>

    <p>To build the online life we want, the Internet community itself must be
      the voice for these values. We must build these values into new products
      and network designs. We must provide models that policymakers can reference
      to develop workable, measured, effective regulations, and we must give
      consumers and citizens ways to make meaningful choices for a better future.
      We must continue to build an internet and internet life that encourages
      broad-based empowerment, opportunity and participation as well as human
      decency and civility.</p>
  </div>

  <footer class="c-article-footer">
    <div class="mzp-l-content mzp-t-content-md">
      <p>For more information about this paper, or to offer comment, please visit
        <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Projects/Reimagine_Open">https://wiki.mozilla.org/Projects/Reimagine_Open</a>.</p>

      <p>The project team behind this paper included Mitchell Baker, Alan Davidson,
        Alice Munyua, and Amba Kak, along with Michelle Thorne and Cathleen Berger,
        and Michael Ham on design. The team thanks the many community members and
        allies who offered input into the ideas presented here.</p>
    </div>
  </footer>
</section>

</article>
{% endblock %}
